Historic Mayo sites to visit this summer

Who doesn’t want to beside the sea for at least part of the summer? In this, the last of three articles exploring some of the sites of Mayo that illuminate our history, we start at the seaside and the end of the 18th century.

If you travel down to Kilcummin, you can find the spot where the French arrived in 1798, to try and support the rebellion of the United Irishmen. Their route, and the clever way they got around the back of Castlebar, is well traced out throughout the county in what is well signposted as Humbert’s Way.

If you stand in Kilcummin, you can imagine the effect of 1,000 French soldiers, in their full uniform and equipment, marching down to Killala, marching past that Round Tower I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. They came on ships, with guns and uniforms and drums.

But what was more important was that they came with ideas. And those ideas were cannon shots aimed at the doors of the Big Houses. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – bang, bang, bang.

The central idea in those three words was that you gained respect because you were human, and not because your ancestor had gutted some enemy hundreds of years before, or made the right choice about who to back in some power struggle, and then put on a fancy suit and called themselves Lord.

The people who were not called Lord are the people you can imagine in Kilcummin. And when you do, you will not wonder then that so many – many of whom could not read or write – followed the French along Humbert’s Way.

They did not need to read to know what all this meant. We often tell this story as a conflict between Ireland and England, whereas it was much more about class conflict. The French had had Lords and had revolted against them. And rest assured, if we had never had the English in Ireland, there would have been Irish Lords who would have happily exploited their tenants in much the same way. 

Many Irish Lords had played the game in the face of the English. One of Grace O’Malley’s famous Tower Houses stood where Westport House stands now. That was because of marrying in, not conquest. Many of the lords in those 18th-century big houses were of Irish heritage, at least on one side of the family, and they set out to crush the rebellion. The contrast with John Moore of Moore Hall, who became President of the Republic of Connacht, is worth noting, as indeed is the shell of his great house.

The French invasion, and the rebellion in general, came to nothing, and throughout the county you can get some sense of the tragic consequences of the loss of 1798. The loss wasn’t so terrible because we couldn’t fly an Irish flag: the loss was terrible because it put ordinary people back under the yoke of landlordism. And any famine village you pass, or lazy beds you see, will silently, eloquently, tell you all about how that unfolded.

And so the final place then which it is essential to visit to complete this loop is the Michael Davitt Museum in Straide. The story of Davitt the man is interesting and important enough on its own. But the Museum is more important for what it will tell you about how that system under which the big houses were built was ultimately dismantled. It will tell you the story of the Land League and how the control of tenants by landlords was first weakened and then destroyed.

It started with agitation for fairer treatment for tenants. But it grew into something much more, and ultimately led to the landlords being forced to sell the land to the tenants. This was truly revolutionary both as a legal act, but also in terms of what it meant. For once the rental income which was essential to the maintenance of those big houses was denied them, the system of landlordism inevitably collapsed. They simply couldn’t pay the bills, and when that happened, they had to either sell up or do like Westport House, and become a tourist attraction. Some became schools, bought by the new power in the land, the Roman Catholic Church, and some, like my own local one in Ballinamore, the estate of the Cromwellian-era Ormsbys, have since become nursing homes. The shells of those houses, or their transformation into facilities used by ordinary people, is the physical reminder of how radical the changes of the late 19th and early 20th-century were.

And don’t think for a moment that these things are simply history, and have no bearing on how we live today. Where did our obsession with living in the countryside rather than in urban villages come from? That was a product of the tenant system. Where did our obsession with owning rather than renting come from? Because you don’t need to know much to know what the lack of fixity of tenure meant when the crops failed around here. And if you drive around and have a look at very many of the large houses that have been built in our countryside in the last few decades, does anyone not see an echo of The Big House?

And while that successful transfer of land ownership is always celebrated in Mayo, it is also worth bearing in mind that an economy of small, largely unviable farms created very many of the challenges and problems that are at the heart of so many contemporary debates today about our past. This was at least part of the story as to why there was such a condemnatory view of sex outside marriage, of what was termed illegitimacy, of all the negatives and often horrors that came with all that. And of course, the irony that that defeat of landlordism also confirmed a system of land transfer which was quintessentially English, from father to eldest son. One of those legacies was large-scale emigration.

Which is why for the last of my suggestions, you should head down to Cong. Not because of its famous house on a site which itself can be traced back to the Burkes, even if the modern-day industrial Guinness family made Ashford Castle as it is today famous. And not because Cong too has a medieval abbey, albeit this time an Augustinian one associated with the O’Connors rather than the Burkes. No, because it is summer time, and there should be lightness in all this historical talk, you should visit to reflect on the filming of The Quiet Man. For if you want to know how emigrants from Ireland chose to imagine the old country, you don’t need to go much further than the village that was the setting for their imaginings.

Wherever you go in Mayo this summer, enjoy the trips, and be sure to pop into the local coffee shops – they’d value the business.